After you finish painting your piece, the last thing to do is give it a topcoat. You may also see this process and these products called varnish, finish, sealer, or clearcoat – these are all basically interchangeable terms in most cases. This process adds at least one layer of a transparent material that protects your paint job from dirt, dust, scratches, dents, and chipping. Without it, even a simple smudge from your finger can take paint off, which is at best a disaster. The topcoats I use are as follows:

• Testors Dullcote, my favorite to date, is a matte varnish that goes on easily and dries reasonably fast, taking away any hint of shine as it does so. The only real downsides are that it’s a rattlecan product, so you need to spray it outdoors, and that it’s quite expensive for the amount you get in each can.
• Pledge Revive It floor gloss, strangely enough, is the intermediate topcoat of choice for a lot of gunpla modelers. It’s useful for leveling out the surface for decals and protecting the paint between build steps. Typically I don’t see this product recommended for the final topcoat, but it’s super easy to airbrush, it’s acceptably non-toxic compared to some other products, and it smells surprisingly decent, making it ideal for that middle coat between the first paint and any weathering or other effects. It’s fairly cheap and broadly available, but I did have a freakishly difficult time tracking it down, because apparently certain grocery and hardware chains ubiquitous in my area just straight-up don’t carry Pledge-branded products – so call first before you spend several hours driving around. One point of note that goes for any topcoat but which messed with me working with this one in particular: dried does not equal cured, and just because you can touch it without transferring any onto your skin doesn’t mean fingerprints or other imperfections can’t develop from handling. Make sure to leave any topcoat – or any paint at all, really – for its full cure time before doing anything else with it.
• Alclad II Aqua Gloss is considered one of the nicest gloss finishes around. I haven’t personally used it yet, but the plan is to put that on top of my RX-93-V2’s armor when it’s otherwise done – but it’s not the kind of thing you’d want to use as an intermediate coat like Pledge.
• I have a can of Army Painter Strong Tone varnish that I purchased for use on the WWII project I’ve discussed elsewhere. This is the stuff people are talking about when referring to the “dip method” of shading and sealing, which is basically what it sounds like. Stir up the varnish to make sure the pigment is evenly distributed, physically stick your mini into the can, shake it around, and hang it up to dry over a surface that can get sticky varnish all over it in a well-ventilated area. The project I used it for was too small scale to hang up the minis, and some of them were unbased figures, so I had to dry them laying on a surface – this was a bad way to handle this process. The varnish stuck better to the cardboard I set them on than it did to the models, and tore some of the paint off. However, the result on the pieces that didn’t have this issue (and by extension any figure that can be properly hung up) is gorgeous, with a hard shiny coat on the outside and a nice even wash of pigment on the inside. It’s very much a wash-and-varnish-in-one as advertised. So far this is also the Army Painter product I’ve been happiest with.
• I picked up the Vallejo Polyurethane Matt and Gloss varnishes and put them through my airbrush, and it honestly was underwhelming. The gloss in particular went on thick and goopy even after adding some flow improver and airbrush thinner, which left the pieces in a pretty gross state. I tried sanding it down, but the varnish also tended to peel away from the paint rather than shave away. I strongly suspect this stuff works fine for certain applications, but the way I used it simply didn’t reflect that.

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